10 Promising Models & What it Means for Leaders

I’m spending a couple days with the most thoughtful folks in leadership development. We’ll spend part of the time looking at new school models and asking what it means for preparing the next generation of school leaders. Following are 10 school models we’ll be discussing:

1. The Education Achievement Authority (EAA) is Michigan’s school improvement district (like the LA RSD and TN ASD). It operates 12 schools in Detroit that share a student-centered competency-based school model and platform, Buzz. For more see:

A deep dive into these new school models suggests 10 element–most common to all of the models:

Student-centered environments

Personalized learning

Competency-based progressions

Adaptive & engaging components

Deeper learning & character development

Rapid & flexible deployments

Dynamic models evolving with new tools

Platform-centric scaling

Leveraging teacher Leadership

Best Practices & Innovation

Last week, I explored the Leadership Implications of the Brave New Blended World and suggested that, in addition to personal effectiveness, school leaders need to be strong process managers (e.g., Doug Lemov) and design thinkers and disruptors (e.g., Clay Christensen). That’s a tall order so I made five suggestions that may make the job more doable:

State policies that allow reciprocal performance-based certification;

Preparation partnerships that aggregate demand and insist on focused and applied learning opportunities;

Specialization that recognize that some folks are better instructional leaders while others are great in design and startup mode; some folks appreciate the structure of KIPP while others thrive on the flexibility of Big Picture;

Rich and ongoing on-the-job learning opportunities, field trips and broadening experiences; and

Distributed and coordinated R&D that shares the load across a district or network and phases it over time.

The shift to digital holds great promise for students and teachers but it will be challenging and confusing for leaders. As the toolset improves, it will become somewhat easier to create high performing platform-centric districts and networks. In the meantime, EdLeaders have a lot of conversations to lead.

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[…] The shift to digital holds great promise for students and teachers but it will be challenging and confusing for leaders. As the toolset improves, it will become somewhat easier to create high performing platform-centric districts and networks. […]